If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
The relationship between Cathy and Mom in the strip is the one relationship drawn from real life that I have proudly never even tried to disguise.
I rarely joke unless I'm in front of a camera. It's not what I am in real life. It's what I do for a living.
More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
I'm very comfortable with an R-rating. I feel like it sounds like what people talk like in real life; I think it's more real to me.
One thing I think is least realistic is that there were five people that made decisions in the fictional 'West Wing.' In real life, there are about five million people that weigh in.
Probably the '86 nationals. That was my first real national title and first real statement I ever made in figure skating, and my life changed after I returned.
Even in real life, sometimes you find that person you click with that you get irritated by every other person in the world but you can be around this person every day and you'd be fine with it.
My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.
Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
We're open people. I don't understand these Hollywood people who don't want to put their real life on TV, yet they want people to watch them and be fans with them.
The result is a picture that represents so much of what I want and rarely get from a movie - a couple of hours filled with characters who are as exciting as the people I know in real life.
Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.
I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.
I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest - things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know.
Even though I make those movies, I find myself wishing that more of those magic moments could happen in real life.
I don't like when I watch a fight in a movie that's perfectly worded and very articulate. If you were able to be that composed, you wouldn't be fighting! Fighting in real life is sloppy.
I take stuff from real life and try to make a character out of it. And I try to live the world of the characters a little bit.
I remember - when I was little, I remember playing 'Tecmo Bowl,' and I would be so excited to be Bo Jackson in the game that I wanted to watch him play in real life.
Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
